The NextMarket Report: Amazon Gets Physical In Battle For Interface of IoT

Over the past few months, it's become clear to me that the battle for the interface is becoming the defining story when it comes to consumer IoT in 2016. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the smart home itself, where many in the industry have realized that if you own the point of interaction with consumers, you will not only own their data, but you will also have significant influence over the bulk of their connected commerce and associated services dollar spend (to read more about smart home monetization, download our complimentary report here).

Exhibit number one in this trend is Amazon, who has dominated the conversation in smart home this year as every company in the space rushes to either integrate or emulate Echo and Alexa. We've written a lot about Echo and Alexa for the past year and a half, so I won't revisit that in this post other than to say Amazon's moves have no doubt accelerated the interest in next-generation interfaces for consumer IoT by at least a year.

But here's where it gets interesting. While everyone is focused on what Echo and Alexa and what they mean for their connected home business, in just the last week Amazon also made it clear their intention to also own the physical interface for consumer IoT with the Dash IoT button.

As I detail in this post yesterday, while many focused on the fact that the Amazon IoT button is for developers, what they missed is that the release of a developer do-anything button signals that Amazon is likely laying the groundwork for a more consumer-friendly version down the road, and with it a resulting push to make the Dash button the connected physical interface for most anything and everything in our lives, well beyond the very focused brand-centric purchase engines that most of us have come to associate with Dash so far. This is huge, and could mean that Dash becomes as big, if not bigger, in impact than Alexa itself.

How so? Because as much as we in technology like to think about the what's next, it's just as important to think about what now with consumers and recognize the long-term ingrained behavior derived from a lifetime of reinforcement. Sure, millennials like touch screens, but even this generation has been pushing buttons for their entire lives. We all have. It's ingrained in our behavior and most of us get some form of physical satisfaction from the simplicity and realness of real buttons (and knobs and other physical interfaces). Button pushing is not going away.

I imagine then if you're Amazon, creating a platform that gives consumers the ability to push buttons to set in motion nearly any action conceivable in their connected world would be pretty powerful wouldn't it?

So that's what their doing if the IoT button is any indication.

Of course, Amazon wasn't first with a do-anything button; Flic and Bttn have been at this longer, but neither have gained any sort of mass market traction that Amazon and Dash can likely create as they move down this path.

Bottom line: 2016 is the year of the IoT interface battle, and it's not all about voice.

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